The 5 Most Interesting Comics of the Week

Every week I write about the most interesting new comics hitting comic shops, bookstores, digital, and the web. Feel free to comment below if there's a comic you've read recently that you want to talk about or an upcoming comic that you'd like me to consider highlighting.

By Rokudenashiko; edited by Anne Ishii and Graham KolbeinsKoyama Press

Koyama Press

This week, a Japanese court ruled that Megumi Igarashi (a.k.a. Rokudenashiko) was guilty of distributing obscene material and fined her 400,000 yen ($3,690 US). Rokudenashiko was jailed two years ago for sharing a digital file that could be used to 3D-print a model of her own vagina. Rokudenashiko is an activist who fights the double standards she sees in her country (especially when it comes to nudity), and the 42-year-old artist has printed a number of models using her “manko” (as she refers to it), including, famously, a crowd-funded kayak.

In What is Obscenity?, a new manga published by Koyama Press, Rokudenashiko tells the story of her arrest in a funny, engaging, and eye-opening way. Interspersing photographs, legal documents, and news articles with her comedic cartooning, she re-enacts the unbelievable experience of being arrested, filmed by the local news in the back of a police car (labeled with the insulting on-screen chyron as a “so-called artist”), and dealing with male lawyers and policemen who are too ashamed to even talk about what she did. What is Obscenity? is edited and translated by Anne Ishii and Graham Kolbeins, who are known for producing the popular gay-erotic manga Massive. The book also features a cover by the legendary book designer Chip Kidd.

Mike Dawson is one of the best observational cartoonists working in comics today. Until recently, he created mostly long-form narrative graphic novels with a literary bent like Troop 142 and Angie Bongiolatti. In 2014, he switched to making shorter, non-fiction comic essays posted to Tumblr which demonstrated his keen and humorous insights as a politically conscious parent trying to navigate work/life balances. In Rules for Dating My Daughter, these online strips are collected as a paperback collection, thanks to a successful Kickstarter to fund the printing.

In one cartoon essay, he ponders the social politics of the Disney Junior TV program Sofia the First, contrasting his daughter’s favorite show with the work of Charles Dickens and an essay by George Orwell. In "Longstreet Farm”—which was shortlisted for a Slate Cartoonist Studio Prize—he uses a visit with his kids to a family-friendly farm to consider the harsh realities of how we get our food and the way we justify it to ourselves. And in the titular comic, he explores what it means to be a feminist dad today.

Dawson’s comics involve a lot of hand-wringing, but they don’t try to posit any easy answers. What they do offer is smart visuals and a self-deprecating humor that will make you commiserate and cringe equally.

The late Masahiko Matsumoto was one of the pioneers of alternative manga in the 1970s. Along with his friend and colleague Yoshihiro Tatsumi (A Drifting Life, The Push Man and Other Stories), Matsumoto helped start the movement known as “geikga” which was signified by a more subtle and sophisticated kind of storytelling than what was found in most manga at the time.

In Cigarette Girl, Top Shelf Productions brings a translated collection of eleven of Matsumoto’s short comics to North American readers for the first time. Many of the stories are variations on a similar theme: Helpless men become infatuated with strong, alluring women. The cartooning style is a pleasant mixture of Japanese and Franco-Belgian style with a clear comedic exaggeration to the characters (even though the stories would be more aptly described as quiet, light-hearted drama than comedy).

Pop Gun War, the self-published five-issue series that put Farel Dalrymple on the map in 2003, is about a young kid in the inner city who finds a pair of wings discarded by a tattooed hipster angel who had fallen to Earth. Full of fantastic-yet-realistic characters that bring imaginary elements into a gritty, urban setting, it was a mixture of late-‘90s art comic sensibilities with a sense of genre comic wonder that was fairly unique upon its debut. Pop Gun War won acclaim and awards from even non-comic sources, like the Society of Illustrators.

Dalrymple is now beginning to tell more stories in this world with an installment called Pop Gun War: Chain Letter, which will appear in Brandon Graham’s Island Magazine later this year. This reissue of the original series is officially renamed Pop Gun War: Gift, and it’s a mesmerizing work.

The hero in Ben Sears’s snappy, imaginative adventure Night Air is a rash, smart-alecky rogue who escapes from one bit of trouble and runs right into another. He's accompanied by a droll floating robot who is always trying to be the voice of reason, and they go chasing after the promise of treasure and end up in a haunted castle full of talking skeletons, disembodied heads, and typewriters that type by themselves.

This is Sears’s first graphic novel and it reads like a marriage between the character designs of Mike Mignola, the childhood wonder of Farel Dalrymple, and the low-key humor of Adventure Time.

Three super-rare Wonder Woman comic books—including issue No. 1—are about to be auctioned off on eBay.

The comics being auctioned (separately) are Wonder Woman No. 1, Sensational Comics No. 1, and All Star Comics No. 8, all featuring some of the earliest representations of DC Comics’s timeless superhero. The rare finds are the highest quality ever found for these items, and their existence wasn't public before the auction launched.

All the comics illuminate Wonder Woman's origins within the comic book world. Published in December 1941, All Star Comics No. 8 marked the first appearance of Wonder Woman. Her first cover image was on Sensation Comics No. 1, originally released in January 1942. Her first full-length comic book, Wonder Woman No. 1, came out in July 1942.

In terms of condition, all of the copies featured in this sale are the highest-rated editions ever found according to CGC, a vintage comic assessment organization. (They got ratings of 9.0 or higher out of 10, meaning very fine or near-mint condition.)

The comics are on sale from comics shop owner Darren Adams, who sold a copy of the first Superman comic in 2014 for a historic $3.2 million. The copy of the first issue of Wonder Woman was originally sent to Harper’s Magazine, only to be put in a cabinet and forgotten. The other two comics were bought from a collector.

The auction starts on August 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time / 8 p.m. Eastern time. A portion of the proceeds will go to the non-profit Trafficking Hope. Watch Adams discuss the comics up for sale in the video below:

A Sequel to The Nightmare Before Christmas is Coming—to a Bookstore Near You

BY Kirstin Fawcett

August 2, 2017

Joel Fletcher/Online USA

Jack Skellington may have found his happily ever after in Halloween Town, but Christmas Town still has some misadventures in store for his faithful ghost dog, Zero. According toThe Hollywood Reporter, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas will receive a comic book sequel, starring Zero, nearly 25 years after the movie’s original release.

Manga publisher TOKYOPOP has secured a license for the project, which will be titled Nightmare Before Christmas: Zero's Journey. The tale—which follows a lost Zero through Christmas Town—will initially be serialized as full-color single issues, and will later be published as full-color paperbacks and tiny, black-and-white manga volumes.

Zero's Journey is slated for launch in spring 2018. Until then, you can check out the cover art below, or get psyched for the comic's release by brushing up on your The Nightmare Before Christmastrivia.